


The Toughest Battle

by orphan_account



Category: The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Anorexia, M/M, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 21:30:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3784924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wrote this because I felt like sharing my anorexic experiences with a fictional character, and who better for the job than Newt, amarite?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Toughest Battle

You don’t know when it started. The Problem, capital T capital P, who knows where it came from. The Problem led to self hatred, and you could never do anything right. The Problem led to your war against food. That had started about seven months ago. Nobody knew. 

The way people could just… eat, could just stuff their faces without a second thought, it disgusted you. You envy them, of course.  
Because you’re weak.  
~*~*~

Nobody knew of the way you filed down to the dining hall with a smile on your face to blend in, they didn’t notice how you laughed and talked and pushed your food around the plate without taking a single bite. Thank god they don’t. 

If they did… they would fuss and make you eat because they don’t understand. How they’re weak, and you’re strong. So strong that you can’t stand up for too long without feeling faint. Strong enough to deprive yourself of the basic nourishment to sustain your life. Your flimsy, insignificant life. 

You’re stupid, and worthless, and pathetic. You deserve this. You deserve to starve.  
~*~*~

The sun stabs you in the eyes, and makes everything fuzzy and distant. Sweat trails down your back, between your shoulder blades, reminding you to keep working. Dig harder, faster, scrape your knees, cut your palms, whittle yourself away. 

One morning in the garden, you discover that your hand fits all the way around the thickest part of your forearm, and you smile.  
How skinny would you have to be to dissolve into a pile of ash?  
~*~*~

You can hear your heartbeat all the time now, pounding away behind your eyes. Every noise you make seems so much louder now. When you step in leaves, they crackle embarrassingly loudly, reminding you of how awfully heavy you are. The creak of your bones seems louder, and when you sneeze or cough, it’s louder too.

In the morning, when those doors grind and creak, you sleep through it. Outside noises are distant. And it’s only when you can hear your stomach growling that you feel like you’ve done something right for once. You make up for the absence of food with water. Lots and lots of water.

And when the water runs over your skin in the shower, you look down, and try to count the bruises that pop up all over your body like flowers. Pretty flowers.  
It scares you sometimes, when you look in the bathroom mirror and see the emptiness in your eyes.  
~*~*~

You don’t like sleeping anymore. Sleep means more dreams, it mean images of food taunting you. You feel guilty about it, but you know that if it were up to you, you would spend all day staring at food as well. You know what’s happening to you. 

Some faint memory that you can’t grasp holds information about countless teenage girls who starve in the name of beauty, and you hate yourself even more. This- this shouldn’t happen to boys. This is for girls. You make yourself eat the full bowl of soup that night. It all comes back up twenty minutes later.

You tell yourself that you don’t eat because you choose not to. The truth is that you don’t eat because you can’t.  
~*~*~

“Yo, Newt,” a faint voice calls, and you turn your head. It’s Minho, and Thomas- the Greenie. You huddle further into your sweatshirt, to hide how thin you’ve become.

Minho tosses you a small pouch, but your reflexes are too slow, and you miss the catch. Tommy laughs. You open the pouch, and your heart stops for a second. It’s cookies, and you’re scared to look for too long because your mouth is already watering. 

“Treat from Fry,” Minho says, gobbling his up, and you push yours in his direction.

“I can’t,” you say, “Ate a lot this morning.”

“Bullshit,” Tommy says, “I saw you. You had one grape. One.”

“C’mon,” Minho chimes in, and pushes a cookie into your pale, shaky hand. 

One cookie doesn’t matter, a tiny voice tells you, but it does. It does. It would mean that you’re weak, you can’t do anything right, and besides, you deserve to starve. But Minho’s looking at you expectantly, and you have no choice but to smile and lift the sugary, greasy clump to your lips. 

You eat it, the whole thing, and it tastes so good, and you just have to eat another. Hot tears rush down your cheeks as the last bite disappears down your throat, and you’re pathetically useless again. You ignore the calls from your friends and run sobbing to the bathroom, dizzy with the effort it takes. 

Minho and Tommy run in after you just as you fall to your knees and push a finger down your throat. Even though you puke it all back out, the food has left its stain all over your insides, and you feel so unbelievably disgusting. Your friends are shouting at you, and pulling you close, but the tears won’t stop, and you fight your way out of their clutches so you can stick your finger back there again, hoping something will come up. Nothing does, and you just cry harder, and the last thing you register before you collapse is Tommy’s broken voice whispering, 

“Newt, oh my god.”  
~*~*~

You wake up in The Homestead covered in blankets, and it isn’t even three seconds before someone is shoving a piece of bread in your face. You immediately recoil, and you want to curl up and die when you see them looking at you hopefully. 

Why can’t they just fucking leave you alone? They must hate you, to purposely steer you down the path of failure, to push the spoonfuls of stew into your mouth, making you swallow it all. It’s torture, absolute hell. When you sleep, you dream about food, and when you wake, they make you eat. 

They make sure you don’t run off to throw up afterwards, and you cry as you feel the food working its way into your system. Once, you struggled and sobbed so hard, you managed to cough up your lunch. You fainted with a smile on your face seconds later.  
~*~*~

When you come back to the world, Tommy’s sitting there, holding your hand. Your cold, bony hand trembles in his warm one. You don’t like that heat. It means he... eats. Tommy produces a small plate of crackers, and you shake your head violently. You know where those are going. To your surprise, he sets them on the table beside your bed, and pats your hand.

“Whenever you’re ready, Newt.”

You go without food for three days until the medjacks return to force-feed you.  
~*~*~

The crackers on the table become progressively more stale until one night, you crumble them up and offer them to the mice. Tommy finds the empty dish in the morning and beams at you, and in that moment, you positively loathe yourself to the core. 

You wish you’d climbed higher up that wall before you jumped off. You’re so useless, you can’t even die without fucking up. 

And so, when Tommy brings in the second dish of crackers, you pretend to be asleep. The fallen look on his face the following morning shatters your weak little heart into a million bits.  
~*~*~

They tell you a girl has come up in the box for the very first time- a girl, and she’s in a coma apparently. They lay her down in the bed across from yours, a spike of jealousy pulses through your veins when Tommy is brought in to stare at her. 

You eat your crackers loudly to steal his attention. It works. 

You’re not sure how to feel when he brings you a bowl of peach slices the next day.  
~*~*~

Whenever Tommy brings you food, you only ever eat half of it. Precisely half. Assuming you do eat anything at all. You can walk without your knees quivering now, and when you run your fingers over the gaps between your ribs out of habit, you notice the thin layer of squishiness covering your bones.

The next five dishes of food from Tommy all go to the mice. 

You like Tommy. He doesn’t force you to eat.  
~*~*~

 

He brings you a cheese sandwich- with only one slice of cheese, bless him, and you finally ask. 

“Why?” Why do you put so much into me? Can’t you see? I’m a hopeless, gross, stupid, fat, whiny, weak, pathetic failure. I don’t deserve food, Tommy. Why?

“I really like you, Newt,” he explains, and you don’t believe him for a second. “I can’t sit by and watch you do this to yourself.”

You laugh for the first time in weeks, “You’re wasting your time, Tommy. There’s nothing here worth liking.”

“Newt, you are the nicest, most compassionate, most helpful person I have ever met, and I know that doesn’t count for much because I can’t remember anything, but everything will be OK. You’re just sick right now, that’s all. And I’m not going to tell you to eat for me, or for Minho, or Alby, or anyone else, because if you’re going to get better, it needs to be your choice.”

“I deserve to starve,” you whisper. Those words just fell out, and you regret them the moment they’re off your tongue. 

“Oh, Newt…” Tommy murmurs, sliding a hand through your dry, washed out blonde hair, “You’re perfect. I wish you could see it.” He crawls under the sheets with you, and you fall asleep with silent tears running over your nose, because for the first time in forever, you’re liking the feeling of human warmth.  
~*~*~

Frypan made chicken pie for dinner today, and Tommy brings you a whole plate of it. Chicken pie used to be your favorite, and you have no idea how he knew that. Your mouth starts watering, and right on cue, that feeling of guilt and self hatred slithers up and clamps itself around your guts like a freezing cold snake. 

Outside the window, boys shout and laugh, and the sparks of a bonfire fizzle up into the air, making you long for the ability to turn back time. 

Tommy is already getting up to leave, and without giving yourself time to decide otherwise, you pick up the fork and start eating. Tommy turns around and stares at you, and you nearly spit the food out, feeling like you've been caught committing a felony.

“Don’t look,” you hiss, finally able to swallow when Tommy turns around and closes the door. Your insides can’t handle the amount of food you’ve just consumed, making you puke yet again, but for the first time, you’re not relieved that you did.  
~*~*~

Gasps and whispers follow you like your shadow when you finally set foot outside. By now, everyone knows what happened to you. You’re no longer “Newt”, you’re just “That-Guy-That-Nearly-Died-Of-Anorexia.” It hurts, and you’ve never felt so small. 

The first night that you were able to eat a full dinner and keep it down, you couldn’t help running to Tommy to let him know. You fight and fight against the hatred that tells you how gross you are with every crumb you eat. It’s far from easy. Tommy once found you sobbing hysterically over a blueberry muffin. He didn’t make you eat it, instead opting to hug you and pet your hair.

Years later in Paradise, it hasn’t gone away entirely. It never will, that much is clear. Every time you stand on a balcony, or a roof or a cliff, there’s always that urge to jump. 

Sometimes you go days without food, and don’t even notice. Tommy has to coax you into eating Christmas dinner, but it’s alright because the two of you fall asleep on the rug in front of the fireplace cuddled together like newborn kittens. 

People don’t understand why you celebrate each and every anniversary of your recovery, and they never will. They don’t know how many days you starved yourself, how many times you passed out, how many hours were spent on your knees, puking your guts out, crying and alone.  
And they don’t have to. It’s nobody’s fucking business.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is always welcome and appreciated =)


End file.
